Yeah, I was wondering the same, but didn't want to edit the original title. Maybe there are some details that are new, I don't know. What the CCP has been doing for a long time now is a shame.
Once installed, Temu can recompile itself and change properties, including overriding the data privacy settings users believe they have in place
If this is actually possible then isn't that a huge security vulnerability in Android and/or iOS? I feel if this was the case we'd be hearing about it from security researchers rather than a lawyer.
I'd believe it because I remember the same being true for TikTok.
I don't have the links on me right now, but I remember clearly that when tiktok was new, engineers trying to figure out what data it collected found that the app could recognize when it was being observed, and would "rewite" itself to evade detection.
They noted that they'd never seen this outside of sophisticated malware, and doubted that a social media company had the resources to write such a program.
doubted that a social media company had the resources to write such a program.
Em... writing a different manifest and asking the OS to reinstall itself, is not rocket science. Detecting that it's running in a testing environment and not asking for permission to access some types of data, is also quite easy. Downloading a different update or modules depending on which device and environment it gets installed to, is basic functionality.
It's still sneaky behavior and a dark pattern, but come on.
There is some irony to be had, in discussing this stuff on a page that starts by asking me to login, then to be good and disable my ad blocker, only to proceed with keeping half the text of the article as images so you can't copy+paste it... and even all the comments!
Using that as a baseline... the CPU type, memory usage, disk space, etc. are some extra data points freely available to all apps.
A developer can distribute an app with multiple versions, some targeting more modern and capable devices, some older and more limited. It's a feature, not a bug!
*Other apps you have installed (I've even seen some I've deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)
This is overreaching for an app that has nothing to do with managing other apps. Still, you may want some app with those capabilities... so let's call it "sus".
*Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)
Your IP is... well, you're using it to connect, they will see it, duh.
The rest is overreaching and comes into PI violation terrain, but can be used for geo location... the OS does it, that's the data it uses to fine-tune the GPS's location.
*Whether or not you're rooted/jailbroken
Typical feature for banking ad DRM protected apps. Nothing to see here.
*Some variants of the app had GPS ping- ing enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds - this is enabled by de- fault if you ever location-tag a post IIRC
Best answered by a comment [1] (SEE BELOW).
TL;DR: more DRM stuff.
*They set up a local proxy server on your device for "transcoding media", but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication
This is somewhat sus, but a local proxy by itself, doesn't mean any sort of risk, or that it could be exploited.
For example, Tor can be accessed using a local proxy (although VPN mode is safer).
The scariest part of all of this is that much of the logging they're doing is remotely configurable,
Not exactly. It's how feature flags, and remote testing/debugging works too.
and unless you reverse every single one of their native libraries (have fun reading all of that assembly, assuming you can get past their customized fork of OLLVM!!!) and manually inspect every single obfuscated function.
This is worse (why do they use a custom OLLVM fork?), and obfuscation usually means they have something to hide. It's the opposite of security for the user.
They have several different protections ir. place to prevent you from reversing or debugging the app as well. App behavior changes slightly if they know you're trying to figure out what they're doing.
Not good, but unfortunately allowed. That behavior is shared by both DRM protected software, and malware.
There's also a few snippets of code on the Android version that allows for the downloading of a remote zip file, unzipping it, and executing said binary. There is zero reason a mobile app would need this functionality legitimately.
False.
There are two legitimate reasons: plugins, and DLCs.
It can be used for shady stuff, but is also a "feature, not a bug".
On top of all of the above, they weren't even using HTTPS for the longest time. They leaked users' email addresses in their HTTP REST API, as well as their secondary emails used for password resets. Don't forget about users' real names and birthdays, too. It was alllll publicly viewable a few months ago if you MITM'd the application.
Well, that's just stupid, there is zero reason to send data unencrypted.
They encrypt all of the analytics requests with an algorithm that changes with every update (at the very least the keys change) just so you can't see what they're doing.
Ehm... this is the correct behavior. See previous point.
They also made it so you cannot use the app at all if you block com- munication to their analytics host off at the DNS-level.
Sus... but see the introductory part of this comment. Should boredpanda also be banned?
TikTok put a lot of effort into preventing people like me from figuring out how their app works. There’s a ton of obfuscation involved at all levels of the application, from your standard Android variable renaming grossness to them (bytedance) forking and customizing ollvm for their native stuff. They hide functions, prevent debuggers from attaching, and employ quite a few sneaky tricks to make things difficult. Honestly, it’s more complicated and annoying than most games I’ve targeted,”
This is bad, and a reason to use FLOSS apps... but since it's been an accepted behavior for Privative Software, along with DRM... don't blame the player, blame the game.
No, seriously, blame the DMCA and friends. There is no way to at the same time "enforce DRM, keep a copy of all keys at a trusted third party, and keep users secure"... so the current situation is "you get none of those".
[1]
sr71Girthbird 39 points 1 day ago
Not OP but I work at a company providing video infrastructure, and one of our products is an analytics suite. It provides all the data he men- tioned and ton more. Turner, Discovery, New York Times, Hulu, and everyone's favorite company, MindGeek all use our Analytics, among hundreds of other large customers. Specifically where this guy says, "Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds" that's called a heartbeat. The app or video player within the app has to have a heart- beat so that the player can detect if a viewer is still watching video etc. Our analytics + video player services send a regular heartbeat every 8 seconds. It definitely pulls in your exact location.
Uh, as someone who does malware analysis, sandbox detection is not easy, and is certainly not something that a non-malware-developer/analyst knows how to do. This isn't 2005 where sandboxes are listing their names in the registry/ system config files.
I haven't done sandbox detection for some years now, but around 2020, it was already "difficult" as in hard to write from scratch... yet already skid easy as in "copy+paste" from something that does it already. Surely newer sandboxes take more stuff into account, but at the same time more detection examples get published, simply advancing the starting point.
So maybe TikTok has a few people focused on it, possibly with some CI tests for several sandboxes. I don't think it's particularly hard to do 🤷
So just like the majority of USAian apps out there? I think Temu fits right in. Why are people so concerned about what China is doing with their data, but not the very countries they live in or (more importantly) the dominant online surveillance presence: the USA?
One thing that's obvious here on Lemmy is that whataboutism works only in one direction. If an article is critical of China, Russia, Iran, or other dictatorships, you'd read, "But about U.S./EU/the West". But there are tons of articles here critical of Western countries, and it's accepted. Why is this? Just wumaos?
It's funny that every time someone points out the pot calling the kettle black the training kicks in to shout "whataboutism" and it must be "wumao". It's almost a meme. You don't think an article about Xi Ping's government warning about USAian surveillance would be mocked and ridiculed due to their Great Firewall? That wouldn't be "whataboutism" though, right? It would be a "critical opinion"?
an article about Xi Ping's government warning about USAian surveillance
Not possible. The CCP doest "warn", it orders to block the app/site/word/photo, and it never existed. Anyone daring to say that it did, or to warn of stuff the CCP didn't say, gets imprisoned or worse (see: the doctor who dared to warn abot COVID, instead of following CCP's truth).
Yeah, these are the 'tankies' who got banned on Reddit, right? I guess it takes time until they get a minority, but it's good that the community grows steadily.
I'm not sure I understand why this question comes up everytime some chinese app is in a news article.
Anyway, it should not come as a surprise, but "Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin", someone who works as AG for a state in the US, presumably is more interested in US interests than Chinese interests, and presumably places more trust in the government and businesses of the country he lives in than in the government (and businesses, for where there's a distinction anyway) of the country of his nation's economic rival.
The difference is, the place where I live has some data privacy regulations which actually get enforced, and I have some legal recourse against organizations which mishandle my data. China does not have such regulations and I do not have any recourse against organizations based there, so my risk from them is significantly higher.
Yes you can, most people aren't. In real life, by far the most common response I've gotten when talking about privacy is 😴 . My colleagues in tech will hotly debate China's surveillance, but happy use face ID on their iPhone, upload their entire life to Google or iCloud (including recordings of therapy sessions), send their blood into do a heritage check, nearly exclusively use Amazon for shopping, have an Amazon Ring camera at their door, and so much more.
“Temu is designed to make this expansive access undetected, even by sophisticated users,” Griffin’s complaint said. “Once installed, Temu can recompile itself and change properties, including overriding the data privacy settings users believe they have in place.”
So just like the majority USAian app out there?
Which apps do that? Because I am certain it's NOT the majority, and very skeptical about any other apps doing that.
Lemmy is just a carrier software, its license has nothing to do with comments.
Instances however, each have their own TOS and can enforce license controls.
Ideally, all comments should have a "license" field, so stuff like instances with ads on them, or subscription-only instances, or CC0/CC-AS only instances, could inform other instances of their rights, and avoid comments that don't meet their policies.
I mean, I don't like either malware. They are banning tiktok due to security and spying on US citizens, as well as some election interference. These are all things that FAANG can and will do, but since they're American it isn't regulated nearly as much as they should be. All invasions of privacy are bad, it's not whataboutism to call out the holes our regulations have by being overly specific to only "adversarial countries".
Yeah malware is bad. It does however become amusing to see people use whataboutism not because they care, but to downplay what X group is doing. So more comes across as approval due to not condemning the act but more reactionary response to being upset X group is being made to look bad.
That usually when whataboutism gets brought, since it draws in people who actually don't care about the concern that is brought up but more a defensive concern.
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Temu—the Chinese shopping app that has rapidly grown so popular in the US that even Amazon is reportedly trying to copy it—is "dangerous malware" that's secretly monetizing a broad swath of unauthorized user data, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
Griffin fears that Temu is capable of accessing virtually all data on a person's phone, exposing both users and non-users to extreme privacy and security risks.
In their report, Grizzly Research alleged that PDD Holdings is a “fraudulent company” and that “Temu is cleverly hidden spyware that poses an urgent security threat to United States national interests.”
Investigators agreed, the lawsuit said, concluding “we strongly suspect that Temu is already, or intends to, illegally sell stolen data from Western country customers to sustain a business model that is otherwise doomed for failure."
Researchers found that Pinduoduo "was programmed to bypass users’ cell phone security in order to monitor activities on other apps, check notifications, read private messages, and change settings," the lawsuit said.
A Temu spokesperson provided a statement to Ars, discrediting Grizzly Research's investigation and confirming that the company was "surprised and disappointed by the Arkansas Attorney General's Office for filing the lawsuit without any independent fact-finding."
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Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, said this week that machine-learning companies can scrape most content published online and use it to train neural networks because it's essentially "freeware."
Shortly afterwards the Center for Investigative Reporting sued OpenAI and its largest investor Microsoft "for using the nonprofit news organization’s content without permission or offering compensation."
Also, in 2022, several unidentified developers sued OpenAI and GitHub based on claims that the organizations used publicly posted programming code to train generative models in violation of software licensing terms
Most people posting content online as individuals will have compromised their rights in some way by accepting the Terms of Service agreements offered by major social media platforms.
The fact that OpenAI and others making AI models are striking content deals with major publishers shows that a strong brand, deep pockets, and a legal team can bring large technology operations to the negotiating table.
People will stop making work available online, they predict, if it just gets used to power AI models that reduce the marginal cost of content creation to zero and deprive creators of the possibility of any reward.
Sounds like the internet needs to have some rules established to keep things under control. Personally, I think 34 rules is a good number, at least at a minimum.
Looking at the logs if my Stable horde worker, more then half of requests made were to generate porn. They'd be shooting themselves in the foot regardless of if the filter worked as intended.
Hell yeah! Nothing good comes from their new model, nor the advertiser-friendly focus of SD3. They were good for pushing the open-source ecosystem forward, but clearly their Capitalist masters have come calling, and they're enshittifying.
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